The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

The latest shot in the work-life balance debate was fired by Mukund Mohan, a Bangaolore-based serial entrepreneur with roots in Silicon Valley, and author of the “Be a Force of Good” blog.

Mohan’s most recent entry, “My discipline will beat your intellect,” argues that the key to start-up success is to recognize that it’s necessary both to “work smart” and to “work hard” – really, really hard.

He writes,

“Some ‘older’ entrepreneurs (usually over 35 years of age) will share their ability to ‘strike a balance’ between work and life. Practically speaking (I hate to break this to them) that does not exist in a startup. If you have that balance, you are not serious enough about your startup.

I understand they have families and kids, but I have come to the realization that both smart work and hard work are necessary (but not sufficient) to run a successful startup.”

I took a similar message from a recent David Brooks column discussing a Bloombergprofile by Ashlee Vance of noted Silicon Valley entrepreneur Elon Musk. Vance reports that Iron Man director Jon Favreau “has called Musk the basis for his version of comic book hero Tony Stark, the playboy inventor who builds a flying weaponized suit.”

While the Brooks piece focuses mostly on Musk’s many professional accomplishments, and doesn’t discuss his five sons (twins plus triplets), Brooks also notes,

“Many employees love him, but there has been at least one blog set up to catalog his mistreatment of those he deems mediocre. He’s run through two marriages already, and his first ex-wife wrote a brutal but not necessarily persuasive takedown of him in Marie Claire. He’s taken a grand total of one vacation in four years, and his romantic life has faltered. As he told Vance, ‘I would like to allocate more time to dating, though. I need a girlfriend. How much time does a woman want a week? Maybe 10 hours?’ “

Between the Mohan blog and the Vance and Brooks articles about Musk, there’s a fairly coherent version that emerges of the consummate Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and it’s pretty intense.

Two questions come to mind:

(1) Are there other models of entrepreneurial success? Are there entrepreneurs who’ve been amazingly successful while also maintaining a sense of work/life balance? In other words, are most highly successful entrepreneurs basically like Musk, or is it that Musk fits our preconceived vision, so we remember (and discuss) examples that fit the mold, and perhaps overlook other examples who don’t.

(2) Even if we assume, for argument’s sake, that most successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs do fit the Musk mode, perhaps this is an accident of history or of the particular technology and sort of people who’ve driven much of the innovation in the Valley. Going forward, you’d think that other examples might still be possible.

I’m not going to react to the first question, or rather, I’d prefer to crowdsource that response – I’d be very interested in hearing in the comments section below about examples of wildly successful entrepreneurs who either fit or contradict the Musk model.

I will offer an initial, and perhaps somewhat personal response to question two, from the perspective of someone who both loves to be with his family and who, while not an entrepreneur, has definitely experienced the sense of Csikszentmihalyi “flow” associated with total immersion in an activity about which I’ve been passionate.

My honest answer is that I think there are few experiences more amazing than “flow,” when you are so at one with your activity that you lose almost all sense of time and life outside the thing you’re working on. You are exceptionally productive. And other commitments do slip -- you really are so much less available for others.

I suspect that most (perhaps not all) creative and successful people, whether Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or not, probably do need the time to detach and focus, to put their head down and selfishly think about their work and no one else.